Kayla Sanders can spend an afternoon building a marketing plan around a single ring, and by the next morning the ring is gone.
That's the job. Kayla runs marketing and online sales for The Jewel Box at Accent, an estate and vintage jewelry business in Memphis. It sits under Accent Jewelers, a family business that has been buying gold and silver for more than 30 years. The team sorts through everything that comes in and pulls out the vintage and estate pieces that deserve a second life.
Which means Kayla never knows what's going to walk through the door. Every piece is one of a kind. It can sell online or in the showroom, to a collector across the country or to a regular who stopped in on a Tuesday.
Most ecommerce brands plan their marketing six months out. Kayla often plans hers the week before. Joy Joya worked with her to set up the brand's Klaviyo account, SMS program, and segmentation, and the system had to be built around one fact.
Once it sells, it's gone.
Plan the Season, Not the Piece
A normal marketing calendar says which product gets featured on which day. That doesn't work when the product might not exist yet, or might be sold by the time the email goes out.
So the calendar Kayla and the Joy Joya team built was a fill-in-the-blank calendar. The things that never move got locked in first: fall, Christmas, Valentine's Day, the known promotions. Those themes were set well ahead. The specific pieces got dropped in a week or two before each send, based on what was actually in the case.
And there was always a backup. If a featured piece sold the night before an email was scheduled, Kayla would flag it and the team would swap in something else.
The same goes for photography. Kayla's team shoots everything in house, often styled with several pieces in one frame. Sometimes one or more of those pieces had sold before the email went out. As Kayla puts it, that's the nature of the business. You plan what you can, then you do your best with what's still there.
The Website Is a Marketing Tool
Fine jewelry at this price point doesn't always sell with a click. Kayla is clear about that. For The Jewel Box, the website is a marketing tool as much as a store. People see a piece online, and that's what brings them through the door to see it in person.
It shows up on the sales floor. At least a couple of customers a week walk in with a product listing already pulled up on their phone, asking to see that exact ring.
It also shapes what goes online in the first place. Someone buying a $15,000 ring or an engagement ring usually wants to see it in person first. So Kayla is strategic about which pieces are worth the time to list.
The hard part is tracking. The in-store point of sale is a different system from Shopify, because it has to handle gold buying as well as retail, and very few systems do both. So for now attribution is partly manual. Sales associates ask customers what brought them in and log it in the store's CRM, when the customer is willing to share. It isn't perfect, and Kayla says it's something they're still working to get to the bottom of.
SMS Is for the People Who Can Walk In
The Jewel Box has two audiences. One is national: people who found the brand online and will only ever buy from the website. The other is local: Memphis customers who have trusted Accent Jewelers for years and who can come to the showroom.
They shouldn't get the same messages. Someone in California is probably not flying in for the Christmas sale. So the email list was segmented by location wherever that was known, with in-store events and promotions going to local subscribers only.
SMS was added for the same reason. It was brand new for the business, and the list is still small. But the people on it are the ones who most want to know what's new.
That matters because of the Thursday drop. Every Thursday, The Jewel Box lists a new batch of pieces. Kayla calls it a treasure hunt, and some customers check in every week to see what came in.
The weekly text became an exercise in merchandising. Kayla picks the one standout piece to lead with. Sometimes it ties to whatever email and social are featuring that season. Often it's a piece from a distinct era, like Art Deco or Victorian, because those come with a story. You're not buying another bracelet. You're buying a piece of history.
The Giveaway That Grew the List Too Well
For Valentine's Day, The Jewel Box ran a giveaway with its own sign-up form, promoted on the site pop-up. The list took off. Far more people than usual joined both email and SMS, and at first it felt like the answer to the list growth question.
Then the quality showed. A lot of those new subscribers wanted the prize and not much else. They didn't open emails or engage with the flows, and a good share of them eventually had to be archived.
Laryssa's view is that it was still worth it. After the cleanup, the list came out meaningfully bigger than it started. But it has a cost. As Kayla points out, a wave of uninterested subscribers pulls down open rates and muddies the numbers you rely on.
She had seen the same pattern on social media. When she first started, the brand ran a giveaway every month. The follower count went up. Whether those followers ever turned into customers was a different question.
So the plan now is fewer and better. Once or twice a year, tied to a gifting moment like Valentine's Day or Christmas, when people already have someone in mind. And paired with Meta or Google ads aimed at the right audience, so the reach comes from people who might actually buy.
When the Online Discount Walks Into the Store
The welcome flow includes a 15% code for new subscribers. It was meant to do a specific job: drive people to the website and build trust that it's okay to buy fine jewelry online.
Then customers started bringing it into the showroom. They'd see a piece online, see the code, and ask the obvious question. If I can get this for 15% off on the website, can I get it for 15% off right here?
It was a back and forth, and Kayla says it still is. Some customers have simply placed the online order with the code while standing in the store.
For the most part, the team honors it. If someone knows about the code, they know about the website, so it's doing its job. And they had to join the email list to get it. That's a contact captured and another touchpoint for the next piece they fall for.
It's a tension that comes with adding ecommerce to a store that has been open for 30 years. The online shop was built to reach people outside Memphis. The local customers found it anyway.
Every Channel Has a Job
The Jewel Box keeps its story consistent across channels. Email, social, and the blog all feature the same theme at the same time. But Kayla doesn't treat them as copies of each other. Each one has its own job.
Social creates curiosity. It reaches people who may never have thought about vintage jewelry and gives them a reason to look closer.
Email is where the curious go next. They join the list because they want to see more pieces and learn more about them.
The blog is where, in Kayla's words, you create your customer. That's where the depth lives: how to style a piece, which era it came from, how the team can tell an Art Deco piece from a Victorian one.
There's a practical limit too. Selling pre-owned designer jewelry online comes with legal considerations around how a designer's name or imagery can be used. Kayla says you have to be careful with it.
Scarcity You Don't Have to Fake
A lot of ecommerce brands work hard to manufacture urgency. Countdown timers, limited drops, low stock warnings. The Jewel Box doesn't have to. Every piece is the only one.
Kayla leans into that directly. This is one of a kind. Once it sells, it's gone.
It does create an awkward moment. Not everyone opens an email at the same time, so some subscribers click through to a piece that has already sold. Nobody has complained to Kayla directly, but it has happened more than once.
She sees an upside in it. A customer who misses a piece they loved might look a little faster next time. Or they might finally buy the next one, because they know what waiting costs.
The One That Got Away
Kayla knows that feeling from the other side of the counter.
Asked about her favorite piece to ever come through the door, she didn't hesitate. It was a Kabana ring with a princess-cut pink tourmaline, bezel set in the center, on a chunkier band with carved opal along just one side. Bright, colorful, unusual. Exactly what she looks for in jewelry.
She didn't buy it. A customer the team knows well did, so she knows it went to a good home. She says she still has nightmares about it, and still thinks about that ring on a regular basis.
That's the business in one story. The same thing that makes the marketing hard to plan is what makes people check in every Thursday.
The job has its own unpredictability too. The Jewel Box is a small family business, so when marketing brings a crowd into the showroom, Kayla sets her own plans aside and helps on the floor. A day she mapped out can change completely. She has also fallen for Art Deco along the way, a style she knew little about when she started and now calls her favorite.
She can't plan around a specific piece. She can plan the season, keep a backup ready, and make sure the right people hear about each piece first. Because once it sells, it's gone.
About Kayla Sanders
Kayla Sanders runs marketing and online sales for The Jewel Box at Accent, an estate and vintage jewelry business in Memphis, Tennessee. She has been with the company for a little over two years. The Jewel Box is part of Accent Jewelers, a family-owned gold and silver buyer with more than 30 years in business, and recently opened a new showroom. New pieces are listed online every Thursday.
-
Website: https://thejewelboxataccent.com
